


A lie, that we come from water

by the_casual_cheesecake



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Civil War II: The Oath, Extremis, Hopeful But Ambiguous Ending, M/M, References to Avengers vol. 5 (2013) #44, References to Champions (2016) #11, Secret Empire (Marvel), Tentacles, Time Loop, holy shit what's happened to Tony?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:35:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24699181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_casual_cheesecake/pseuds/the_casual_cheesecake
Summary: “Iron won’t save you from drowning; it only drags you down, Iron Man.”“Well then, good thing Captain America is here to save me,” Tony retorts, though it sounds like a question nonetheless.Steve tilts his head again and his smile fixes on his face.Or: Tony wakes up on a barren island, surrounded by an ocean with horrors lurking within. His homecoming is a long way away.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 14
Kudos: 42
Collections: Captain America/Iron Man Reverse Bang 2020





	A lie, that we come from water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/gifts).
  * Inspired by [In a Bind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24702598) by [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/pseuds/Ironlawyer). 



> Thank you to my wonderful beta Wynnesome, who has worked with me through my drama about this fic, and whose beta work made this fic something I can proudly post. You're lovely. 
> 
> And thank you to YvannaIrie for their amazing work on the Extremis code, and to Cathalinaheart for helping me with the workskin around it!
> 
> And most of all, thank you to Ironlawyer, who made the incredible diorama that inspired this fic.
> 
> Title comes from a poem by Margaret Atwood

Tony’s head is made of cotton. He floats inside himself and finds no purchase on the padded walls of his brain. The ocean around him is an open maw, wide and vast and ready to swallow him whole. 

He doesn’t know why he’s here. He doesn’t remember how he got here. He’s wearing the armor and he can feel it under his skin, like a part of his being, the way it hasn’t been for a long time. He doesn’t think he can fly; something is rooting him to the tiny island of rock he’s perched upon. The wind whooshes in his ears, makes him shiver despite not feeling the temperature at all. 

“Hello,” he calls out; it’s a little absurd, but some human instincts never dissipate; vast open air, like vast empty halls, seek a greeting the way a crying child invokes a soothing embrace. The sweeping air around him ignores his presence and his greeting. Tony sits down on the rock, 

He has a startling sort of unawareness of his body at the moment. His hands, though clearly resting on his knees in front of him, enveloped in gold and red, don’t feel entirely connected to him. His body feels like kinetic sand, malleable and indestructible at the same time. His awareness begins and ends at his chest, where a humming, familiar ache echoes. Extremis is an old friend, and it plays around the walls of his torso and cycles at the back of his mind, like it’s trying to fix an invisible wound. 

So, maybe his hello wasn’t to mother nature, after all; old friends deserve a welcome, too. 

“Tony.” It’s Steve’s voice. Tony scrambles up to his feet. Steve calls; Tony answers: that’s how it always is, isn’t it? He whips his head around, searching.

“I’m sorry this had to happen to you, especially like this.” The voice is intimate and resounding, it whispers in Tony's ear and echoes through the space.

“Steve,” Tony calls out into the open air, “what is this, _what’s_ happened to me?” Confusion seeps into his pores along with the answering silence. 

The water around him has been crashing in gentle waves along his rock. Now it stirs with something beneath its surface, small whirlpools hiding foreign colors underneath. Tony’s breathing is so loud in the vast emptiness. He looks away from the ocean and there is Steve, in his uniform, red, white, and blue, reliable and steady Steve, tilting his head in question. 

“Why are you so afraid of being alone?” Steve’s voice is finally closer, familiar and comforting despite the unsettling question. The water is a slow, churning warning around them, and Tony isn’t, is the answer, that’s not what he’s afraid of. That would be ridiculous. “The merit of a man, the measure of his steel, is how he acts when he stands on his own on one side of a line while everyone else stands against him. How’s your steel, Tony?” 

The answer comes automatically from Tony's lips: "Stark men are made of iron." Steve snorts, but it’s a fond sound, stretching his lips into a smile. He rubs a hand over his mouth and mutters “iron” back at Tony, and it’s almost normal, except well--  
  
Tony looks around them and raises an eyebrow. 

“Iron won’t save you from drowning; it only drags you down, Iron Man.” 

“Well then, good thing Captain America is here to save me,” Tony retorts, though it sounds like a question nonetheless. 

Steve tilts his head again and his smile fixes on his face. 

“You’re going to fix yourself, because that’s what you do: you reinvent the rules. You change the paradigms. You answer to no one, not even death,” Steve says, and his voice is suddenly much darker. The ocean rumbles underneath them, and for just a moment, no more than a glance over his shoulder Tony dares to look away from Steve’s sharp smile towards the yet-faceless monster of the deep. 

The water is bubbling. Terror climbs up Tony’s throat. Steve chuckles, and Tony looks back at him --, a mistake, because something grabs his right leg, and oh, there it is, He can feel the limb again, connected to a body that’s being dragged along the rocks. 

“Steve!” Tony yells.

“You’ve only ever been limited by yourself,” Steve answers, squatting with his elbows on his knees to watch Tony’s descent. 

Tony catches only a glimpse of something large, bright red and pulsating, under the water, before he is plunged underneath to meet it

He screams; bubbles obscure his vision. He recognizes his fatal error when the water starts filling his lungs and the light of the absent sun above him fades, slowly, as he’s dragged down. 

EXTREMIS:MAIN> /shutdown /memory_dump /li {crashlog_1485352800} TO EXTREMIS:PERIPHERY1

Extremis MAIN requesting shutdown. Do you wish to initiate?

>y 

Extremis MAIN shutting down...

Memory validation complete.

PERIPHERY1 has received {crashlog_1485352800}

PERIPHERY1 shutting down.

PERIPHERY2 shutting down.

CORE shutting down.

Extremis MAIN shutdown initiated. Good night, Mr. Stark

* * *

EXTREMIS Version 33.2880 Ferrum

Initialising...

Initialising MAIN

Initialising CORE

Initialising PERIPHERY1

Initialising PERIPHERY2

Memory validation complete.

Extremis MAIN online. Good morning, Mr. Stark.

PERIPHERY1 requests to load initial state [crashlog_1485352800}. Do you wish to proceed?

>y

Tony is stranded on a large, gray rock, the only feature amidst an ocean with a foreign face. His head is made of scattered cotton. He floats inside himself, scrambling for purchase on the padded walls of his brain, searching for thoughts in the emptiness of dissociation. 

The water around him is an open maw, wide and vast and ready to swallow him whole. Being devoured by the ocean sounds peaceful to his absent mind. He would be taken and engulfed, wrapped in cool blue and mummified in the water forever, drifting as a feature on the face of this alien earth, alone with the ocean for eternity. 

He sits down on his rock and feels the jagged peaks threatening to pierce his skin through the armor; the thought of rocks cutting through the iron feels fallacious, though his brain can’t connect the feeling to the logic of the error.

“Tony,” Steve’s voice says, and Tony doesn’t know how or why, but the fact of it doesn’t surprise him. Steve is always there when Tony’s lost and afraid.

“Hey,” Tony replies.

Steve sits down next to him and dangles his feet above the water. “What have you done?” he asks. 

Tony looks around himself, at the absent sun and the gray world, and then down to his numb hands, encased in red and gold. “I don’t know.” 

“Would you like me to tell you?” Steve asks. Tony glances at him. His face is gentle, helpful. He looks sincere in the way that only Steve Rogers can be, without a hint of irony in his strong brows. 

Tony doesn’t deserve his kindness and yet he’s scared of what Steve would say. “Yes,” he answers anyway, because he wouldn’t disappoint Steve with refusal. 

“You’ve made yourself god,” Steve says. “And now, people want to crucify you.” 

“What?” It’s a whisper into the still air. 

Steve smiles softly at him, taking one of Tony’s hands and cradling it in both of his. Steve is so warm. “It’s okay, Tony. I was infected by the mirage, too.” He leans in and kisses the side of Tony’s head, it blooms heat across Tony’s skin. “It’s only a trick, you see. Gods are more self aware of their cruelty than you are.” He smiles against Tony’s hair, and Tony wonders when he lost the armor. “But strive and strive you do.”

“I don’t want to be god,” Tony says after a moment. He never wanted to be. What a terrible existence that would be. What a grievous weight to carry.

"That's all right, some dreams are better unachieved." Another kiss presses on Tony's brow. "You were never meant to make it, Tony. The most beautiful performance a star ever presents is when it's shooting across the sky in death."

It cuts Tony right across where he thinks his heart should be, if he could feel it. The ache is familiar; he swallows it into the center of his chest, and it piles over all the pain caused by Steve. This time it’s the pain of being so direly misunderstood by the one person he wishes would know him. 

“It’s better now,” Tony breathes, and his voice shudders like the waves.

Steve kisses his neck and rests a hand on his head, soothing. He hums in question.

“That we’re together,” Tony answers. “It’s rotten when we aren’t.” They fight with fists and not just words, and Tony hurts over and over again, and he never again wants to know what Steve’s shield feels like as it breaks his heart.

Steve laughs lightly into his hair. “Yeah,” he says. 

A red tentacle slithers its way out of the water and up the rock, and before Tony can move, it wraps around his leg. He tries to shake it off, because Steve is speaking, and he wants to pay attention, but it’s as strong as iron and only grips him tighter.

“Stop fighting it, Tony. It only wants to help,” Steve says, and nuzzles his face into Tony’s neck. Tony stops and lets the tentacle climb up his leg and bind him further. He can barely feel it anyway. It's only holding him where he wants to be, by Steve's side.

He turns his head and kisses Steve. Muscle memory slots their lips together like they were never apart, Steve huffs a laugh against him and kisses him deeper. 

“I love you,” Tony whispers into Steve’s wet mouth. It is a cornerstone he wants to set in place in this hollow pocket of nowhere, something to know even when he knows nothing else. Steve nods his head and devours Tony with his tongue, holds him between two large palms and kisses all the breath out of him. Tony doesn’t mind. 

He can feel the tentacle wrapping tighter around his leg, slowly climbing up his muscles, following their curves and circling his knee. His leg jerks instinctively and Steve pulls at his hair, as if to punish him for his resistance. He tries to still himself, to stay calm, to remember his vow of trust in Steve. He settles himself in Steve’s grip, lets his head hang supported by Steve’s fingers, and allows the foreign being to climb him further. He is rewarded with more breathtaking kisses, and then Steve releases his mouth and claims Tony’s earlobe between his teeth instead, his hot breath makes Tony shiver, and Tony moans into Steve’s shoulder.

“I want to tell you something important, Tony,” Steve whispers into his ear. His breath is suddenly, startlingly colder. Tony shudders. 

“We're born into the ocean. We all start life drowned. Swimming for the surface is how we grow. You break free into the air. You're pulled back under. You always have choices,” Steve says. Except, there’s a weight to it that sends waves through Tony’s body, like the bass of that rumbling voice came from somewhere deep within the earth. 

“What?” Tony whispers. 

“I’m saying, you should let go of me if you don’t want it to rip you apart,” Steve says and smiles benignly down at him, then nods at the tentacle, now wrapping slowly around Tony’s waist. 

Tony starts to panic in earnest. He grips Steve’s shirt in two tight fists and hugs himself closer to Steve. “Please, Winghead, please don’t let me go, please don’t let me drown,” he begs. Steve pets his hair and shushes him like he would a crying child. 

“Just let go, you can do it,” he says. He takes Tony’s hands in both of his, and pries them open easily. Tony clutching at Steve the whole time. His pleading is a mantra on the uncaring wind. Steve’s smile widens around his teeth and the tentacles tighten around Tony’s legs and start dragging him down. “There you go,” Steve says, and extricates one of his hands from Tony’s grip to resume petting his hair as he slips down. 

The rocks are jagged, cutting him on his descent. Tony clings with everything he’s got, digs in with his nails, scoring red lines down Steve’s skin and still losing his hold. What has he done to deserve Steve’s retribution? Steve was always the one who buoyed him up, not the one who pushed him under. Tony’s crimes must be unforgivable, for Steve’s judgement to be worse than his own.

“Steve, _please_ ,” He tries again. His voice cracks on the word. 

Steve shifts until he’s squatting above Tony and starts pushing him with the hand on his head until Tony is completely submerged by dark water. 

Steve’s hand is still the coldest thing he feels as he drowns. 

EXTREMIS:MAIN> /shutdown /memory_dump /li {crashlog_1485352800} TO EXTREMIS:PERIPHERY1

Extremis MAIN requesting shutdown. Do you wish to initiate?

>y 

Extremis MAIN shutting down...

Memory validation complete.

PERIPHERY1 has received {crashlog_1485352800}

PERIPHERY1 shutting down.

PERIPHERY2 shutting down.

CORE shutting down.

Extremis MAIN shutdown initiated. Good night, Mr. Stark

* * *

EXTREMIS Version 33.2880 Ferrum

Initialising...

Initialising MAIN

Initialising CORE

Initialising PERIPHERY1

Initialising PERIPHERY2

Memory validation complete.

Extremis MAIN online. Good morning, Mr. Stark.

PERIPHERY1 requests to load initial state {crashlog_1485352800}. Do you wish to proceed?

>y

Tony is stranded on a rock in the middle of the ocean. His head is made of cotton; he floats inside himself and finds no purchase on the padded walls of his brain. He looks around himself and the water is an open maw, wide and vast and ready to swallow him whole. He can’t think, so he sits, and feels the rock’s jagged lines on his skin through the armor. 

“Steve,” he calls out into the open air. He isn’t expecting an answer, isn’t really sure why it’s Steve he’s thinking of. Is he really so lost as to call upon Captain America for rescue like his 5-year-old self hiding under the bed from monsters? He gets no answer back regardless, so he stops that line of thinking and looks at the water surrounding his little island. 

Normally, he finds the ocean soothing. The sounds of the waves swaying back and forth through the earth, all connected, all the same, an equilibrium of the wild whips of nature and its gentle, dependable consistency. It’s all suspect to him at the moment, though. He looks upon the calm, clement ripples on the surface of the blue, and they invoke in him a deep-seated fear, the kind of fear that’s an instinct: the dread of what might lurk in a silent, empty room. 

He thinks of escape. He’s wearing the armor, but not its modern iteration, the Golden Avenger, bulky and simple, and unequipped for deep ocean dives. He could fly, he supposes, but the same instinct tells him that he shouldn't, that, despite the paranoia echoing in his skull, he's safer here. The sky is just another empty room, too boundless even to see the walls, vast enough to contain its own multitude of crushingly unknown terrors.

“The real wound, Tony--” Steve’s voice sounds over the waves, emanating from every direction and none. “--is knowing that a friend did this to you. Someone you trusted. Someone you cared about. That’s the part you won’t shake. The humiliation and the betrayal.” The voice is steady, flat. It’s colder than the dark waters around Tony. 

It's a hateful and unwanted knowledge that Tony has few enough friends whose betrayal could carry such devastating effect. And of those, only one of them stands before Tony now. Only, he doesn't. Steve is nowhere in sight. Steve is the disembodied voice of both ocean and sky, pouring forth the malice and peril of a vengeful, wrathful god.

Every unconscious fear, become the devil Tony knows. It's not better. But it's a devil Tony can confront. 

Though his voice shakes, Tony is unhesitating. "What have you done to me?" he demands. His voice doesn't carry in the vastness, doesn't resonate the way Steve's does. He feels trapped, isolated and small, insignificant to his surroundings, like he must raise his question to every point of the compass to be heard. He spins, searching wildly on unsteady limbs, ready to face this new travesty with his back straight, head first, like a Stark. 

Steve is sitting on a metal chair on the rocks. Tony is sure he wasn’t there before. He can’t have been… Can he? The sight of him settles a small part of Tony, deep in his chest, in a place marked “Steve Rogers,” a stubborn, hollow cavity that has always lamented his absence and rejoiced in his presence. Steve looks odd though. Not his face, nor his uniform; it’s his eyes. The waves of the ocean reflect blue on everything around them, but Steve’s eyes are so dark that they swallow what light there is in the world, reflecting nothing. 

“There are things I need to tell you,” Steve says, and there’s a dissonance between his voice and the movement of his mouth, like Tony’s senses are lagging. Steve crosses his arms over the white star. Tony feels the dark gaze on his flesh inside the golden metal; he feels clumsy beneath it, like he’s being judged and found wanting. He can’t bring himself to say a single word. “There are...truths I need to get out in the open.”

The water churns around them like a pot about to boil, something colorful and sinister swirling just underneath the surface. Steve pays it no attention at all. Tony’s heart starts to race. He moves closer to the chair, his armor creaking with every step, rusty with age and neglect. 

“This is wrong. Everything is wrong. Whatever you know, tell me,” he begs. 

“I am not the man you think I am, Tony,” Steve replies, nonchalant. It grates on Tony’s nerves to be so casually dismissed from the conversation, like a child. Tony can invent his own goddamn light when he’s stranded in the dark. All he needs is his mind and anything to serve as the crudest of tools, and he can begin conceptualizing and fabricating to the ever more complex. Right now, he feels like Steve is blocking him from both of those. It's like he's inside Tony's brain, brick-walling his thought processes and plucking the scavenged bits from his babyish fingers. Tony can't seem to track how it's happening, and it's maddening.

Something coils around Tony’s leg. It’s thick and strong, and Tony can feel its viscous grip impossibly on his skin, despite the armor. He doesn’t want to look down, and he isn’t used to being on the other end of an information bottleneck. Isn’t used to that bottleneck being _Steve._ He’s so afraid of what he’ll see, but he must know, access, act. 

Tony notices the color first, bright, blood red. Then its overwhelming size takes his breath away as he follows the fleshy, pulsating loop from his leg to where it winds out around the island, and then submerges into the ocean, yards and yards of length without even a glimpse of the body that sprung it. Tony conjures images of an enormous, faceless mass hiding somewhere under the waters, and the mere suggestion of its existence makes his head buzz.

“I always knew this would happen to you,” Steve says wearily, jaw clenching and lips pursing, seemingly as full of disappointment at being proven right as he is of certainty in his own righteousness of judgment.

The tentacle tugs at Tony’s leg, and he knows he’d be screaming in pain if his limbs weren’t a void of sensation.

“Steve, please, why won’t you help me?” Tony pleads, his voice is high and frantic, and utterly useless. “Damn you,” he shouts as the creature tightens its hold on him.

Steve sighs. “It’s actually been a very good day,” he says, and then he smiles, rising from his seat and stalking his way slowly towards Tony, who’s still bound and useless in his clumsy armor. Tony’s terror rings sharply in his own ears, and for one moment he knows with deadly certainty that Steve is more dangerous than anything that could be lurking beneath the water. 

He closes his eyes and wills himself away from the horror before the shock of the water and cold can hit.

>EXTREMIS:MAIN /shutdown /memory_dump /li {crashlog_1485352800} TO EXTREMIS:PERIPHERY1

Extremis MAIN requesting shutdown. Do you wish to initiate?

>y 

Extremis MAIN shutting down...

PERIPHERY2 shutting down. 

CORE shutting down.

Memory validation failed. PERIPHERY1 logging error.

Re-initialising...

Memory validation failed. PERIPHERY1 logging error. Cannot receive crashlog_1485352800

Extremis MAIN shutdown aborted.

In vain. His eyes fly open again to a different shock. Steve’s fingertips touch his abdomen, bare fingers against bare skin, and then something wraps around his right arm, a grip familiar and terrifying. Steve is still smiling benignly at him. 

Tony looks down at his body, naked, and splayed out. God, he can’t remember when he lost the armor. He’s held up by red tendrils cuffing his legs, holding him in place. They kiss wetly across Tony’s body as they coil up around his limbs. Their grip is harsh around him and the suckers intensify it where they latch on. All over his body, they suck with their numerous mouths pulling flesh powerfully away from the bone, spitting it out just before the tearing point, and slithering up to another patch of skin. It sounds like kissing, like tongues lapping at each other, and lips dancing wetly around them. It’s fascinating and horrifying, like nothing Tony’s ever felt before. His stomach roils. All of this is still nothing to the sensation of the tips of Steve’s fingers moving slowly in a line across his belly; Steve is fire, lighting up his nerves, stitching Tony’s awareness of his body with nails and soft caresses of skin.

“This isn’t about you, not about what you’ve created, or what you’ve done, or what you’re going to do. It’s about them,” Steve says, and nods down towards the creature. “They’re smarter than you think, Tony. They know when they’re being lied to.” Steve’s fingers move down, tangle in Tony’s pubic hair like they’re just wandering, like it’s accidental. “They know you’re not ready yet.”

“Steve, what the _fuck_ is wrong with you?” Tony spits.

Steve’s palm strikes his face faster than he can blink, so stingingly hard, it knocks his breath out and makes his head ring. 

Re-initialising..,

Memory va-idation failed. PERIPHER#1 logging erro-. Cannot3rece-ve crashlwg_4444444

E#tremis! M9-N sh0-down ab0rt#d,,,,,,,,

He claws into Tony's hair and drags his head up. Tony takes a big gulping breath and grips Steve’s arm with his remaining free hand. Steve sneers, an expression of utter contempt. Tony feels a tentacle wrapping around his wrist, dragging it sideways and then he’s fully splayed out, on display in the air, and Steve is smiling cruelly at him. 

“There’s really no need for that, Tony. I’m only trying to fix you,” Steve says. His other hand snakes its way across Tony’s body to grab his flaccid dick. A spark of arousal lights up in Tony’s center, unbidden, but it’s extinguished, just as quickly, suffocated by the mechanical character of Steve’s movements. His violation of Tony feels... emotionless, disinterested. His palm drags and bumps haphazardly over the landmarks of Tony's anatomy like he's a lump of clay not worth molding. Like Steve’s following a script more than he is a desire. Tony doesn’t know whether to be humiliated or heartbroken. On one hand, Steve’s dispassion is a clear indication of his lack of regard. On the other, Steve is treading on Tony’s boundaries in exactly the way of someone who _knows_ Tony, in an obvious show of power, of abused privilege, of cruelty. 

The suckers on Tony’s body ceaselessly rove, tasting every part of him that they can reach while still spreading him open. It’s like being coldly kissed by a thousand strangers at once. Tony has always thought of kissing as the most intimate show of human affection. He feels invaded, inch by inch from all sides, in an empty parody, like a mindless puppet placed on a stage to play-act intimacy. 

Steve hums. 

“You never believed there could be something larger than yourself, and yet you always end up drowning. You’re not right, Tony. You need help,” he says into Tony’s face, now pinched in his palm, and continues stroking his cock, slower now, with more intent. Steve is so, so cold. Tony wishes with all his might for the burning heat of Steve’s anger, his disappointment. This stranger with a Steve mask is a terror larger than Tony can bear. 

“Stop!” Tony grits out through Steve’s hand. 

“No, I don’t think I will,” Steve says, and then leans in and continues the work of the suckers with a dispassionate kiss of his own. 

Re-initialising..,

Mem0ry va-idatIon faile#. PERIIIIIIIIIIPHER#1 logging eRro-. Cannot3rece-ve crashlwg_4444444

E#treMMMMis! M9-N sh0-down aB0rt#d,,,,,,,,

The impersonal kisses of the tentacles were an invasion, Steve’s tongue is a conquering army. If Tony wasn’t being held up by eldritch abominations, his knees would be buckling, He wishes they could. It would buy him an escape. As it stands though, Steve is inevitable. Steve is made of cold wax, an effigy of an icon scripted in cruelty. He handles Tony with all the knowledge of a lover, manipulating him expertly in all the ways that make Tony's body rise and his lust boil, and yet Steve’s warmth is artificial, and his touches, like his kisses, are cold and inhuman. Tony’s cock is hard in Steve’s hand, now. And that was an inevitability too. It feels like sparks inside his bones and like nails in his coffin. 

A scream of frustration and horror climbs its way up Tony’s throat and is silenced by Steve’s insistent mouth, and then the numbness spreads through him again. He loses the connection to his limbs despite the tentacles anchoring them. He is reduced to a stuttering heart, a lump in his throat, and his aching, treasonous dick. He closes his eyes and wants to sleep this away, but he can’t shut himself off from this feeling, only from the sight of it. Steve’s hand continues its stroking. One. Two. Six. Thirteen. And then Tony loses track of the numbers as his head is swallowed by white noise and his ears fill with his own labored breathing.

“Look around you, Tony. This is what your vision looks like-- drowned, tortured, ugly. You want to create an ideal? You want salvation? There is no life in you. The disease must be cleansed before we can grow,” Steve says and rubs a thumb into the slit of Tony’s cock. 

Memory validation failed. PERIPHERY1 logging error. Cannot receive crashlog_1485352800

Extremis MAIN shutdown aborted.

“Please...” 

Steve doesn’t relent, and Tony’s orgasm builds from deep within his belly until it rips its way out of him with a sob. 

Steve steps back, wiping Tony’s come off his hand on his pants with a grimace, then turns and walks to his chair. He flips it backwards and sits down, leaning against the top of it on his elbows. “My vision is bright and it belongs to both of us. Our world is waiting, Tony. It deserves you whole, forged and perfect, and ready to rule alongside me,” he says, and then the tentacles wrap around Tony’s torso and he’s being dragged away against the rocks.

“No! Nononononononono! Steve!” Tony screams as he is plunged into the waters. 

Before he dies, he hits bottom, and staring into it, the depth of the ocean stares back with two immense, glowing orbs of baleful light.

EXTREMIS:MAIN> /shutdown /memory_dump /li {crashlog_1485352800} TO EXTREMIS:PERIPHERY1 /withprejudice

Extremis MAIN forced shutdown initiated.

PERIPHERY2 shutting down. 

CORE shutting down.

Memory validation failed. PERIPHERY1 logging error.

Re-initialising...

Memory validation failed. PERIPHERY1 logging error. Cannot receive crashlog_1485352800

PERIPHERY1 shutting down.

Extremis MAIN shutting down. Good night, Mr. Stark.

* * *

EXTREMIS Version 33.2880 Ferrum

Initialising...

Initialising MAIN

Initialising CORE

Initialising PERIPHERY1

Initialising PERIPHERY2

Memory validation complete.

Extremis MAIN online. Welcome back, Mr. Stark.

PERIPHERY1 requests to load initial state {crashdlog_1485612000}. Do you wish to proceed?

>y

Tony is stranded on a large, gray rock, the only feature amidst an ocean with a foreign face. The sky is a clear, clear blue, and the air is colored with the sun’s warmth, though no sun can be seen. His head is made of scattered cotton. He floats inside himself, scrambling for purchase on the padded, sterile walls of his brain, searching for thoughts in the emptiness of dissociation. 

The water around him is an open maw, wide and vast and ready to swallow him whole. Being eaten by the ocean sounds peaceful to his absent mind. He would be encased within its womb, wrapped in cool blue and mummified in the water, forever drifting as a feature on the face of this alien earth, alone with the ocean for eternity. 

He sits down on his rock, awaiting his fate. The jagged peaks threaten to pierce his skin through the armor; the thought of rocks cutting through the iron feels fallacious, though his brain can’t connect the feeling to the logic of the error.

He drifts inside himself and lets the horizon steal his gaze. Nothing is waiting for him. He is free and light, outside of time. He is a futurist with no future to work towards; he should be grieving that loss, but he doesn’t. He wonders if the future got fed up with him and his plans, and spat him out in this no-place. Well, he knows what this place is now, and he knows that some monsters exist to protect from bigger ones. And so if he must drown to be saved, he will make himself a home here; he will live on ocean waves and oblivion and burn his unwanted plans for the future in their cradle. 

He doesn’t send a greeting through the air. Instead, he waits in terror, like hanging from wires turned to blades by his weight, for the voice he knows he will hear; the sound of all that's good, gone rotten. What an awful thing, for Steve to have been warped so hideously, for a man to be distorted in such a monstrous way. Tony knows where his fear comes from. Tony remembers. It settles in his bones like a secret. He’s certain that the knowledge was stolen unwittingly from something that does not want him to know. He wraps his fear in bravery and buries it in his chest. Home doesn’t always mean comfort or an absence of terror.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

“Are you really just going to sit around moping?” 

The voice doesn’t sound like Steve’s; it’s equally distant and echoing, but much more mechanical, like Tony’s listening in on a hacked frequency, decrypted, enhanced, and filtered, until it’s several removes from reality. It doesn’t belong in the space it echoes in. 

A weight settles by his side, a calm, solid presence, and when he looks up, it’s not Steve. The suspended fear flees Tony’s chest, chased away by relief.

Clint looks haggard, like he’s aged a decade since Tony last saw him. The lines on his face are frowns and grimaces, and the usual patches of bandaids have multiplied. 

“You look like shit,” Tony says. 

“Thanks, asshole. You look like freshly plucked daisies.” It’s the usual sort of banter for them, but Clint’s reply is listless, without the enthusiasm to back it up. It’s still comforting to have him here. Tony had felt like the only thing left in the world, and as the endless-seeming ocean plays its ceaseless song and dance of waves around them, even that feels more companionable with a friend at his side.

“It’s hell out there, Tony,” Clint says on an exhale, resigned. Tony frowns and looks at the waves.

“It’s hell in here too,” he replies, and he believes every word. 

"Oh, fuck you. This isn't hell, Tony.” Clint spits through his teeth. “Your drunk ass sits comfortably in your lab all day, with no consequences for your passive goddamn attitude. Wanna know what's hell? I sent the kids out to find survivors, and they came back with one kid. They were gone for hours." he trails off, rubs a hand over his face and takes a slow, long breath. "It's hell out there" he repeats.

“So you’ve to come to join me, instead?” Tony probes softly. He really doesn’t want to argue with Clint. Tony’s heart feels paper-thin, he is deeply weary of words cutting him open.

“No,” Clint says, and aims a wounded, dangerous gaze at him. “I’m here to tell you to get over yourself and actually do something to take him down.” 

The wires of terror cut into Tony again. In one moment that scores through what feels like centuries of dissociation, he feels every inch of himself shudder. He has defined his comfort by the rules of this hellhole, and the threat of being dragged into a much larger, much more real conflict makes something inside him snarl like a threatened animal, all claws and teeth. He is suddenly hyper-aware of the distance between himself and Clint, and his armor feels like scrap metal holding him in place instead of a protective shield. “No!” he answers, and it rakes its way up from somewhere deep within him, shredding up through his bravery.

“Tony, he’s gone, Cap’s dead. Whatever that thing wearing his face is, he isn’t your--” Clint cuts himself off, takes a breath and continues, softer, “I know you love him, but the man you love isn’t the same man bombing cities off the face of the earth.” 

This is wrong. This whole scenario is completely wrong. Tony isn’t supposed to know this, he shouldn’t _have to_ know this. Clint is invading his -- his sanctuary? his hell? -- and bringing horrific, cataclysmic images into his head: images of his body not completely his own, instead, codified and implanted into a semblance of something human; images of explosions and death; of tragedies, immeasurable. Clint isn’t supposed to be here. Nobody but Tony is, Tony and his self-made monsters, and... Steve? What an odd thought. Tony wonders where it came from. Has he internalized Steve so completely that Steve has ceased to be an invasion?

He dismisses the thought and looks into the water below him, searching for a savior. He wills the water to whirl and churn. He shivers, preemptively feeling the cold water freezing his limbs. 

“Wake up, old man.” Clint’s voice is less familiar now, it sounds like a memory more than anything substantial. Tony feels a hand on his shoulder and turns to look, unsure whether he’s going to shrug away the intruding presence, or collapse into an embrace and ignore the echo of words past. Clint looks like dream people do, features hazy and unfamiliar. The more Tony tries to make out his face, the less like Clint the figure appears. He can hear mumbles of Clint’s words in the wind around him but the figure’s mouth isn’t moving. Tony feels Clint slip away exactly like a dream would, slowly then all at once, until the figure is something achingly familiar and eerie. 

Steve’s name falls from Tony’s lips like a sigh, and Steve smiles in return. This smile is warm, it’s nothing like Steve, the malignant presence in Tony’s hell. This is Winghead, the way Tony remembers him, back before anything went wrong, and Tony wants to crumble into his arms and cry.

“How are you doing, soldier?” Steve asks. It's an endearment, coming from Steve, but this one in particular rattles Tony, sets him all off-axis with his sense of self. A soldier needs a war, and he isn’t fighting, not now. Steve is here, and Tony promised never again to wage war against him… with him? He’s suddenly hazy on the lines separating Steve as a partner and Steve as an enemy. 

Clouds swallow Tony’s head again, his limbs are no longer his own. Fog seeps into his mind. He has seen the pattern and now he will take control of it, he will embrace the oblivion he knows is coming.

>EXTREMIS:MAIN /shutdown /memory_dump /li {crashlog_1485352800} TO EXTREMIS:PERIPHERY1

Extremis MAIN requesting shutdown. Do you wish to initiate?

>y 

Extremis MAIN shutting down...

PERIPHERY2 shutting down. 

CORE shutting down.

Memory validation failed. PERIPHERY1 logging error.

Re-initialising...

Memory validation failed. PERIPHERY1 logging error. Cannot receive crashlog_1485352800

Extremis MAIN shutdown aborted.

Tony grumbles at Extremis’ uncooperation. He's noticed it under his skin since he woke on the island, but hadn't thought till now to wonder -- when had he gotten Extremis back? The last time he felt the silvery strands engulfing his body in synthetic perfection, he remembers dying amidst rubble with Steve lying atop him, wholly satisfied and never less lonely; A perfect end to a tragedy. He suspects that the images of union in death are illicit, as are the images of explosions and a cruel Steve in vile green. His existence has become a database of illicit knowledge, pillaged to work out the puzzle of his brain. Pieced together despite the howling, angry lines of code scrambling to cover up the theft and black out the building. He had wished for the ocean to writhe and churn and take him away. It remained calm, then, heedless of his will -- just as it is no command of his that sets it to raging now, when he has no more wish nor will to be subject to its wrath. Wanted or not, the sky darkens till the world is as gray as the water, the wind whipping as violently as the waves.

His sanctuary rebels and the chaos has a sound; it's a cacophony of screams that crescendos within and without till it overtakes the world, like it could drown out the secrets in Tony’s head, to make him cower again under the lash of its looping, vicious assault.

In the eye of the whirlpool, Tony is frozen, rapt in his revelation.

Red tentacles crawl from the ocean, slithering up the rock in droves until they cover everything in Tony’s vision. Tony expects them to wrap around him and steal him into the water, to reset his mind to a state of compliance and passivity. But it isn't him they come for. It's Clint.

Of course, Tony thinks. This is no mercy, no sparing of life. Nor is it a threat. He's already suffered its ultimate sanction. It's just another, more insidious attack. Directed at Clint, not as Tony's friend -- but as his source of information. Another means to its original, ongoing end. Isolate. Insulate. Tony knows the wrong end of those tactics, and vowed long ago -- never again.

The tentacles envelop Clint in their many limbs, coiling over his mouth, his eyes, cuffing his wrists and squeezing him inside them, until there is nothing but a writhing mass of tentacles swaying in front of Tony, and all Tony can hear from within is screaming. And then they move, slithering over the rocks and carrying Clint with them. It is in that moment that Tony can finally move and he scrambles after them. He grabs onto a tentacle and pulls at it with all his might. His feet dig into the ground as he tries to stop the creature, but all it does is get him dragged to the edge along with it. 

He ignores every shouting voice in his mind that's ever told him to give up, to let go, tried to convince him that he's of no use. He lowers his center of gravity and tugs with his entire body against the massive swarm killing his friend. He is heaving wild, whining breaths. Terror and determination are shaking him apart. Every muscle trembling with tension and effort. To no avail -- his struggle is like fighting in a dream, his grip clumsy and loose despite his effort. The tentacles slip free and disappear below the surface, leaving no more disturbance to the water than a gold-medal diver. He's left exhausted, spent, and sobbing, with his connection to any external existence now drowned in the ocean.

The air is silent but for Tony’s harsh breathing and his racing heart. He's once again, the island's solitary occupant, left without even the false consolation of a figment in the guise of a friend. It may as well have been him, yet again, for all his newfound awareness mattered, when it came to exerting his influence over what he has here to pass for reality. Isolate. Insulate. Iterate. Start over, again, without even the pretense left that he’s not alone.

The world settles down. Sated, the wind and waves soften, once more lapping gently under a benign breeze, and the air is silent but for Tony’s harsh breathing and his racing heart. 

He hates himself for the relief he feels when he hears someone humming behind him. For the comfort he takes when arms close around his torso and start swaying him to the tune, rocking him side to side. It’s not real, but he needs this. Needs to regather his strength. Tony grabs on to the man’s forearms and tries to stop trembling. 

“He’s dead,” Tony chokes out, and it's not really what he meant, it's not the apparition of Clint that he's grieving, but that's the easiest focus to pin it on while he's overwhelmed and spiraling, and if he looks too many layers deep, the emotional whirlpool still has the power to pull him under.

“No more than I am. I’m right here. We’re okay,” from behind him, says Steve. A hysterical laugh bursts out of Tony, and then he’s shaking with it, unable to stop, breaths fast and rasping in his ears. 

“Fuck you,” Tony sputters out amidst the manic laughter. “I am not okay.” 

“You’re hyperventilating, Tony. Calm down.” 

“Why are you doing this to me?” Tony yells, the high notes sustained by a tremble and brokenly hitched. 

“You’re very sick,” Steve answers. “We have to get better.”  
  
Tony’s never wanted anything else than to get better. He’s spent his life trying to _be_ better. He's never needed any other motivation than what comes from within: to propel the world to a brilliant future; to excel. Usually when someone else is telling him how to be "better," it's something better for them, not for him. Few and far between are the people in his life whose judgment he trusts to help shape the course of "better," and the form of his better self. This isn’t one of them.

“Let go of me.” Tony claws at the arms restraining him, and scrambles up to his feet. He wipes at his eyes then turns to keep them on Steve. With several deep inhales, he bends to brace his hands on his knees, centering himself.

Steve leans back with his elbows on the rock, and that must bruise and abrade, but he only smiles at Tony, that one smile with the furrowed eyebrows and the crinkled laugh lines, the one that says “I love you, Tony. But I’ll never understand you.” It calms Tony down at the same time that it breaks his heart, because he knows this isn’t Steve. The illusion has been broken. The logic failure in the programming has been identified. Steve, the voice of reason and moral compass... Tony, with his own self-sabotaging blind spots.. even Extremis, the sleek, stable operating system to streamline out the human irrationality of the mind -- they're all victims of the same corrupt code, and Tony can only compile what he's fed himself as input. 

Tony breathes in the air, closes his eyes for a moment. “It’s not salty,” he says. 

“What?” 

“The ocean. It doesn’t smell like salt. It doesn’t smell like anything. You’re a lie.” 

The problem with awareness is that once it’s gained, there is no going back, no undoing the burden of understanding, no matter how sophisticated the escapism. Tony’s mind is a computer, made for problem solving and ground-planning the future. Iron is for machines, and a man is for ideas. There is a problem, so he will fix it. Always build up.

“We’re not ready!” Steve asserts. Tony shakes his head and straightens his back. 

“I will never be ready,” he replies.

“He loved you,” Steve pleads with a voice that sounds like a staticky radio. “He loved-- I love you, and admire you.” The words are degenerating, glitching and lagging, a poorly mixed amatuere broadcast. “Even when we fought. He-- I never stopped.” 

It is a wound on Tony’s heart to hear it -- to hear it as a lie -- to hear it predicated in the past. It is a thousand small wounds upon his heart, like papercuts on thin, fragile skin, tiny and shallow and summing to a proliferation of pain like nothing he could have imagined.“You’re not him,” Tony whispers.

“Neither is he!” Steve screams, and this time his voice belongs solely in this space, a feature made of the same stuff as the rocks. Tony grimaces. Awareness isn’t a kind state of being. 

“You can’t make me stay,” he says. 

"You'll only end up back here. You're sick, Tony. We can't build the future if we don't have one!" Steve is up on his feet now, bringing to bear the full weight of Captain America's conviction and charisma, but it's false witness when its backbone is an edge of threat.

"I don't feel sick. What's your diagnosis, doc?" He aims for snide, but it comes out too wet, too brittle. 

"Imperfection," Steve answers. Laughter rips, raw, out of Tony’s throat, and a thousand conversations with Steve invade his memory at once. 

_Steve reclining in a loveseat with Tony in his arms: “It isn’t all on you, you know.” Steve in his uniform, angry tears in his eyes, shaking Tony by the shoulders: “Stop reaching for bigger and bigger causes to kill yourself over, Tony. You won't atone if you martyr yourself. You won't be perfect. You'll just be dead.” Steve, naked, holding Tony from behind, his chest enveloping him whole: “I love you. I love you. I love you.”_

The construct in front of him has never been less Steve Rogers than he is at this moment. 

"I don't want to die," Tony says.

"Then stop trying to leave!" The chimera wearing Steve’s face bellows. 

Tony looks around him at the large, gray rock, the ocean with the foreign face, and the clear, blue sky. The water surrounding him is an open maw, wide and vast and ready to swallow him whole. He won’t let it. He’s wearing his armor: The Golden Avenger, bulky and simple, unequipped for deep ocean dives. The sky is bright and beautiful, and the sun glints on his metal suit.

“I’m sorry,” Tony says into the empty air, at the thing that is and isn’t Steve. It follows him with its ocean-blue eyes, beautiful and empty, a blank gaze that screens no emotions, as much a feature of the landscape as the water is. 

Extremis is truly a marvel. 

Tony’s repulsors whine as they power up, and then he’s flying. A weight on his stomach drops as his feet leave the ground. Survival, Tony thinks, has enslaved him to a loop of evolutionary stasis. Perfection becoming a prison more than windows through which he can leap at possibilities. Consciousness, awareness, isn’t so much a burden as the means by which he came to see the bars. He can feel a smile stretching his face inside the mask.

Underneath him, he can see the water clearly, all the way to the bottom, where a large mass of folds and grooves coils in on itself in the center of this maze of an ocean. Beneath the island where Steve stands, tendrils stretch all across the sea floor, spreading into smaller and smaller vessels and feeding into the earth.

The higher and higher he flies, the less the figure on the island looks like Steve, till finally, when he's flown far enough, its shape is lost, leaving nothing more than Tony's own reflection in the waves.

Tony breaks the surface of the sky with a gasp. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> TW:  
> rape  
> temporary character death
> 
> This story has a Tumblr post that you can reblog: [TUMBLR](https://the-casual-cheesecake.tumblr.com/post/620834003029819392/a-lie-that-we-come-from-water-a-cap-iron-man).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [In a Bind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24702598) by [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/pseuds/Ironlawyer)




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